@Count:
Stephen is the translator this forum needs, but not the one that it deserves. That pun was more beautiful than the Beautiful Pirates.
But he is the translator One Piece deserves. So many scanlators seem to miss that it's meant to be a funny goddamn comic. It's not a good enough treatment to just say "t/n: this was a really good pun in Japanese actually" and assume it carries the same tone as there actually being a pun there. If the fanmade works actually played around with different jokes and puns and things to replace the old material with there could be some actual point of comparison between the two. Instead, all that shit gets to be a T/N and Mangastream decides Dogtooth is the hill they want to die on instead.
I grew up reading Asterix. It was hilarious, full of puns and language gags on top of its physical and character driven comedy. I had no idea it had actually been translated from French until much, much later, and that's what was so great about that translation. So smooth to read you'd never even know it was one. They would add jokes and puns that only worked in English in places there were none before, to make up for the ones elsewhere that they couldn't translate, and because missing an opportunity to make a joke wouldn't be true to the spirit of the original. The text of Asterix was elegantly woven into a new language, and the new language and the text were made to work together. With manga scanlations in general (and even some official releases), the text and the new language are awkwardly hammered into each other, with a T/N reminding the reader that this story wasn't written for them, foreigner that they are, and they won't be allowed to pretend otherwise.
I understand there's a pretty big difference in translating between two western languages and going between east and west, because the languages are fundamentally less compatible. And I get that the higher number of cultural differences and the right to left way of reading will probably create a harder to ignore feeling of foreignness for the reader regardless of the dialogue's flow. And hell, my perception of Asterix's translation's quality is probably influenced heavily by nostalgia. But it's so rare to get that immersion in the Japanese comics I read so many of today, and I feel like that's a huge shame.
So yeah, points to Stephen for his willingness to play around with the joke and pun opportunities the source material offers, and the general high quality of his work. He is, by a wide margin, the best I've seen One Piece get in English.
@BellisarioFaith:
- Official English name of Daifuku's DF power: "Puff-Puff Fruit". Like Jaimini's says, Oven's is the "Heat-Heat Fruit".
Whatever happened to the info from the spoilers saying Hoya means lamp or lampshade? All translations covered that Daifuku is a lamp man, but were the spoilers for the fruit name a mistranslation?